The American Brown Shirt Act of 2010

This perennial  is back under the name of the  "Universal National Service Act" of 2010.  As usual its time has not yet come, but that doesn't keep our home-grown authoritarians from trying. When they get their way, every young American (up to the somewhat un-young age of 42) will be conscripted for service to The American Crown. It restores the military draft, and adds a novel feature -- erasing that language of the 14th Amendment barring involuntary servitude.

If you can't or won't pick up a gun,  Uncle Sam will put you to work enforcing the law, rooting out terrorists  (a term conveniently undefined in the bill), or laboring on public works projects.

It is a relic of the enchantment of our senior elected statists for the1920s and 30s when the  USSR persuaded our intellectual elite of the beauty of an entire national population marching in lockstep toward a glorious future under a Glorious Leader. Skeptics, and especially individualists,  were not excepted, and the posters of the period continue to inspire the likes of Charlie  (I didn't steal nothin') Rangel.

Congressman Rangel, Democrat of Harlem, heir to the toolbox of Adam Clayton Powell, is the sponsor of this bill, just as was been for  its 2006 and 2008 incarnations. His co-sponsors in previous years have included congress critter Yvette Clark who is widely known as the Democrat from Flatbush who has a great deal of trouble remembering if she graduated from college and, if so, which one,  Oberlin or Medgar Evers.  (The answers are "no" and "neither one.")


Another earlier sponsor is our old pal James Mc Dermott, Democrat from the twee side of Seattle.  You may know him as Baghdad Jim for his 2002 trip to Iraq where Babylonian delights were said to paid for by Saddam Hussein's spies.

Look, there are 535 men and women in Congress, and only a handful are mentioned here in relationship to the universal service scheme which serves as the factual basis for accusations  that His Obamaness wants a massive corps of civilians under his personal command. In fact, not enough of the 535 buy into this putative New American Order enough to pry the bills out of committee.

But there are enough of them to frighten any thinking citizen out of his wits.

Rangel  -- this year's lone sponsor of H.R. 5741 -- may,  but probably won't,  be booted for public  malfeasance beyond the tolerance of even his Capitol colleagues. He may leave voluntarily when the heat is turned up.  But even if he somehow departs,  the statist dream remains alive and well on the miasmic Potomac banks.

It may be that we are just one more economic implosion away from having universal serfdom start looking pretty good to the folks who want a chicken in the pot and the trains to run on time.